Finding out that the iPad mini 6 features Apple’s latest and greatest A15 Bionic would have stirred customers into absolute excitement, but like all of its presentations, the company did not provide a clearer picture of the tablet’s performance. According to the latest benchmarks, the SoC running in the slate features an underclocked CPU, and in some tests, it is beaten by the A14 Bionic from last year.
iPad mini 6’s A15 Bionic Gets Beaten by A14 Bionic in Several Single-Core Tests - Wins by Major Margin in Multi-Core
By default, the A15 Bionic’s performance cores are running at 3.23GHz, but in the iPad mini 6, Apple has seen fit to reduce those clock speeds to 2.99GHz for some reason. This reduction of frequencies allows the A14 Bionic in the iPhone 12 Pro Max to overtake Apple’s latest custom silicon by a small margin in multiple single-core tests. Fortunately, the multi-core results show a different story, with the iPhone 12 Pro Max beating the iPad mini 6 in just two benchmarks and that too by the skin of its teeth.
Despite the clock speed reduction, the A15 Bionic obtains a 23 percent lead against the A14 Bionic in the Speech Recognition multi-core test. In Text Compression, Apple’s latest SoC beats the iPhone 12 Pro Max by 14.9 percent. Other tests show negligible differences between the two chipsets, and this information backs up a previous report which stated that Apple was unable to bring significant CPU performance gains to the A15 Bionic due to a lack of talented chip engineers, who have apparently left the company.
However, depending on which GPU the iPad mini 6’s A15 Bionic features, it could deliver some serious graphics performance improvements. To bring you up to speed, Apple has used a 5-core GPU for the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max and a 4-core part in the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini. With the 5-core GPU, we reported the A15 Bionic registering a jaw-dropping 55 percent graphics performance increase against the A14 Bionic GPU.
The A15 Bionic’s 4-core GPU results were disappointing, though, so if these sort of things really matter to you, hope that Apple used a 5-core GPU for the iPad mini 6. As for the underclocked CPU running in the tablet, we doubt you will experience any performance dips or lack of a fluid UI, even when running the most demanding apps, so we would not worry about it too much. Then again, Apple should be questioned about the decisions it has taken with its latest chip.
News Source: Geekbench 5
